The Wolfram language was released for the Raspberry Pi in 2013 with the goal of making it free for all Raspberry Pi users.[9] It was included in the recommended software bundle that the Raspberry Pi Foundation provides for beginners, which caused some controversy due to the Wolfram language's propitiatory nature.[10][11] Plans to port the Wolfram language to the Intel Edison were announced after the board's introduction at CES 2014.[12] There was also a short lived proposal to make Wolfram libraries compatible with the Unity game engine, giving game developers access to the language's high level functions.[13][14]

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The language was officially named in June 2013 although, as the programming language of Mathematica, it has been in use in various forms for over 30 years since Mathematica's initial release.[6][15] Before 2013, it was internally referred to by several names, such as "M" and "Wolfram Language." Other possible names Wolfram Research considered include "Lingua" and "Express."[7]

Both Stephen Wolfram and his son Christopher Wolfram were involved in helping create the alien language for the film Arrival, for which they used the Wolfram Language.[16] They were given portions of the written language, and used Wolfram Language to analyze the images and attempt to interpret them. This served as the model for how the characters approached the problem in the film.